MALAYSIANS love their durian. But do they know how much their enjoyment of that fruit and their fundamental health depends on bats?
New Sunday Times columnist Rohiman Haroon describes witnessing durian rapture like this: "(O)nce it touched the tongue, the lusciously nectarous with a tinge of bitterness taste would put you on the highest level of ecstasy."
Our King of Fruits was even featured on the United States talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live!, its taste described as "bleu cheese infused in a creamy pudding that had garlic and onions in it".
Beyond our huge domestic market, there's increasing demand for Malaysian durian overseas, mainly from China, in particular for the Musang King variety. Before Covid-19 hit, the Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority had a RM50 million export target for Musang King durians to China (though now, of course, nothing is certain).
Some have been quick to put the blame for Covid-19 on bats. But not so fast. There is a lot of research yet to be done to confirm the source of the coronavirus. And certainly, let's not create ecological disaster in the form of massive culling of bats in a misguided eagerness to avoid pandemics.
We must avoid the folly expressed in our Malaysian saying: "Marahkan nyamuk, kelambu dibakar" (Burning the whole net out of anger with one mosquito). In other words, creating a much bigger problem trying to correct another.
Writing in the latest edition of online magazine The Conversation, environmental historian Peter Alagona, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, stresses that bats provide invaluable services to humans and need protection.
For example, bats pollinate around 500 plant species, including mangoes, bananas, guavas, durian and other crops essential to the human diet and world economies. Each night, insect-eating bats can consume their body weight in bugs, including mosquitoes that carry diseases like Zika, dengue and malaria. In that way, bats offer people a critically important health shield.
Bat droppings — guano — nourish entire ecosystems and have been harvested for centuries for use as fertiliser and for making soaps and antibiotics. Much needed today is research about bats, says Alagona, "why they carry so many viruses, and why these viruses only jump infrequently to humans — typically when people hunt bats or intrude into places where bats live.
"Bats carry a range of viruses that can sicken other mammals when they jump species. These include at least 200 coronaviruses, some of which cause human respiratory diseases, like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome."
People raise the risk of transmission between species when they harvest bats or encroach on their habitats. Humans pack live bats into unsanitary conditions with other wild species that may serve as intermediate hosts. This may have happened at the Wuhan wet market, where many experts suspect Covid-19 emerged.
Knowledge gaps identified by Alagona include questions such as: why do bats seem unaffected by virus diseases? Perhaps genetic mutations boost their immune systems, he suggests; or, as the only flying mammal, perhaps bats generate so much internal heat in flight that their bodies fight off illnesses.
Long reviled as pests, flying foxes or fruit bats ("keluang" in Malay) have declined steadily in recent years, hunted or chased off by mango and durian farmers. Now, non-profit research organisation Rimba Research, founded by a young husband and wife team, Dr Sheema Abdul Aziz and Dr Reuben Clements, has shed light onto the ecology of fruit bats.
For instance, their main food is the fruit of wild fig trees, and they play an important ecological role as dispersers of seeds. Camera trap footage reveals that fruit bats visit durian trees, but do not actually eat durian flowers. They only feed on the flowers' nectar without damaging them.
Globally, there are around 70 fruit bat species, six of which have gone extinct in recent times. Meanwhile, around half of the surviving fruit bat species are considered threatened with extinction, and many others are imperilled locally.
Sheema, conducting her research at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in France, cautions that governments have a major role in conservation by extending legal protection to flying foxes/fruit bats and their habitats.
"For flying foxes, this means protecting rainforests, mangroves and swamps," she says. "Mangroves and swamps are the last few refuges sheltering flying foxes from hunting pressure, so their roost sites need to be secured."
It seems obvious, too, that in general we need well-respected boundaries for all wildlife, such as establishing protected areas in perpetuity. We should take this opportunity to reflect on our overall relationship with nature. For our safety and health, we need social distancing between our species and many others on which we depend.
The writer is a senior fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia and a former science adviser to the prime minister